


Skipping

by MercuryGray



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Secret Crush, Unrequited Crush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-01
Updated: 2016-06-01
Packaged: 2018-07-11 12:37:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7051798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryGray/pseuds/MercuryGray
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a rare moment of quiet at Mansion House, Hopkins is taking some time away to collect his thoughts on recent events in the best way he knows how -- skipping stones on the millpond.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Skipping

Henry hefted the stone in his hand, feeling the weight for a moment as he contemplated the still surface of the water. There was something comforting in childish pastimes -- other men would throw a ball or race between one point on a field and another, but Henry’s consolations were quieter, more contemplative. 

 

And he needed contemplation today, more than ever.

 

Perhaps it wasn’t wise, coming here to this millpond, removed from the city, where anyone could come or go. Lines were changing all the time, Hale was fond of reminding him in hushed, urgent tones. Spies and scouts could be everywhere.

 

Well, if they wanted to kill one man for going to skip rocks, Henry reasoned, then perhaps that was not a bad way to go. For there were worse ways -- far, far worse.

 

It was one of his many odd jobs at the hospital to help carry the wounded inside from where the wagons left them off in the street, and make sure while they were waiting they had water, if they could take any, and the consolation of prayer, for those beyond saving. There’d been a young man of twenty, twenty five, severely burned over most of his face, the entire front of his uniform bloody and lacerated, lying with the others, his hands gone.  _ Exploded gun,  _ Henry had silently diagnosed, looking at the man’s blue facings, the sign of an artilleryman. The blast had knocked him clean off his feet and thrown him backwards, while also filling him with white-hot metal. An  _ expectant _ case, the surgeons would have said, as in,  _ expected to die _ . Water, and the solace of the Lord, but nothing more that they could do.

 

But Emma Green - God love her - Emma Green had taken one look at him and decided he was not going to die while she was watching. She had a streak of stubbornness in her that Henry could not help but find endearing -- she’d put her hands on her hips and fix someone with her hardest stare, and wear down the toughest men with it. Which is what she’d done with Summers, reasoning, with the hard earnestness of a woman twenty years her senior, that this was a simple surgery and surely Doctor Summers had time, today, for one more, since the boy had been in the moribund ward for hours and still hadn’t expired, and was surely worth the time. 

 

Summers had glanced at the petite Southerner with her fierce glare, standing there daring him to do better than his office required, and finally gave in, motioning for the artilleryman to be brought in. 

 

Henry sighed. Every advantage given -- a straightforward wound, a nurse willing to advocate for him, a surgeon willing to operate. 

 

And still the boy had died. On the table, just as Summers was finishing his work. Blood loss, or shock. Difficult to say, in cases like these. It happened often. 

 

But what did not usually happen after such announcements was the nurse receiving the news turning to whoever happened to be nearest (Hopkins, in this case) and sobbing bodily into his jacket.

 

It was normal, in the course of usual pastoral practice, to find oneself consoling widows, bereaved sisters, sorrowful mothers. Since he’d come to Mansion House he had seen more than his fair share of sorrowing women. But none of them were his colleagues, people who worked with him day in, day out. None of them were Emma Green, for whom he professed a growing fondness, a certain proprietary care, as one might show a sister.

 

At least, that was what he had been telling himself. But one did not wrap one’s arms around one’s sister, and press one’s cheek to her hair, and kiss the crown of her head, and hold her there for as long as it was possible for arms to hold.

 

To his great credit he had  _ done _ none of these things, but the minute she had turned to him in blind despair (as she would have turned, doubtless, to Foster, or Hale, or any of the others, merely looking for a rock on which to rest) and hung upon his shoulders, and cried, he had  _ wished  _ to. And wished strongly, at that.

 

God, but it was  _ a war!  _ And she did not need that! None of them did! But he would want it regardless.

 

He turned the stone in his hand again and let it go, watching it skip once, twice, and sink. A poor throw. A second soon followed, worse than the first, sinking on the first try. He growled a little, picked up another, and, taking a few steps back, threw it as hard as he could. Five perfect jumps, the rock skimming the water with a little indignation of its own.

 

“Was it the rock or the pond that you found offensive, Chaplain?” 

 

Henry turned towards the voice, watching as Doctor Foster made his way out of the trees, jacket tucked over one arm, sleeves rolled to the elbows and hands in his pockets, the picture of a country gentleman taking his ease. “That was quite a skip, there,” the surgeon observed, joining the chaplain on the shore. “Though I knew a man who could do ten in a row, with a good stone.”

 

Hopkins found himself smiling. “They skip rocks down there in Baltimore?”

 

Foster smiled. “Indeed we do. Especially on Friday afternoons when we were trying to skip school.” He smiled, glancing at the stones at his feet and picking up a likely candidate, feeling it in his hands before sending it -two-three-four- across the surface of the pond with practiced ease. “Did it a bit in medical school, too, when we were trying to escape studying.”

 

“Seminary, too.”

 

Foster laughed at that. “Wouldn’t have thought you the kind of man who runs away from your problems, Chaplain,” the surgeon observed, picking up another rock and sending it out -- only three skips this time.

 

“Well, I’ve done plenty of it,” Henry admitted, tossing out another. One skip and then it sank.  _ Bad luck.  _ “It wasn’t the rock I was angry at, it was myself.”

 

Foster’s silently raised eyebrows invited him to go on. Henry gave a small, private laugh, considering another rock with the toe of his boot and picking it up. “Have you ever...wanted something you knew you weren’t supposed to?”

 

Now it was Foster’s turn to laugh. “I think that’s the  _ human condition _ , man.” But he did not laugh long, as if he were making fun of Hopkins. He smiled, nodding his head. “Yes, I have done that, a great deal -- and then some. Running away from problems, too,” he added. “I find they always catch up with you.”

 

“And what do you do then?”

 

“Face them, I suppose,” Foster said with a shrug, swinging his arm back and laconically bringing the stone forward -- three - four - five -  _ six!  _ “That’s the part I haven’t quite got the hang of yet.” He considered the surface of the pond, the circles left by the skipping stone spreading apart from their origins until the path was finally gone, obscured by itself. “The...ah...the ... _ problem _ you were running away from,” the surgeon began, picking his words as carefully as they had both been picking skipping stones, hunting around for just the right one. “Wouldn’t happen to begin with an  _ E _ , would it?”  

 

Foster’s face was level and fair, though Henry’s could not help but be startled. He  swallowed nervously, remembered the slim body pressed against his own, the racking movement she had made with each sob, feeling of her arms, pressed into his chest. “It might,” he admitted.

 

“Only she did seem... rather close after that last surgery of Summers’ , earlier,” Jed explained with the smallest of shrugs. “Not a bad problem to pick, if you ask me,” he said conversationally. “Plenty of worse ones out in the world.”

 

“Plenty of easier ones, too,” Henry said in reply, pausing and wincing as he realized how that had sounded. “Not...I meant…”

 

“I know,” Foster said with a knowledgeable nod. “Not getting solved any time soon, you mean.”

 

Henry hated the way it sounded, but it was true. “Something like that.”

 

Foster nodded again, shrugged, picked up another stone, feeling the edge. “It’s the harder problems that are the worst. The ones that...that keep you up at night, the answers that evade you. The ones you have to study more. Those you love even after you’ve solved them, I’ve found. The stories that didn’t make sense until they did. And then you wanted to go back, and read them again to see what else you’d missed.” Two skips, wide and loping over the water, straight out to the middle.

 

Henry found himself studying Foster, wonder whether Foster, too, was speaking of a problem that was not really a problem at all, but a person. The man was married, but he did not seem to mention his wife overmuch -- and the way he was speaking now was not the way of the indifferent spouse towards his helpmate. But what he was saying, about study, about being kept up at night, these were things to which Henry could relate. Weren’t the stories over which he’d slaved with his dictionary the ones that in translation sounded sweetest, and made for the best of sermons? 

 

“She’s not made for me,” Hopkins said, skipping another stone in the same direction as Foster’s.

 

“Ah, no, that I must debate you on, despite what the Good Book has to say on the matter. Women are not made for us -and it is every man’s folly thinking otherwise,” Foster declared philosophically, making a third stone skitter along behind Henry’s latest attempt, practically hop-scotching through the same path. “No, we are made for them, to...stumble along in life until they pity us enough to pick us up. And we struggle mightily to deserve them after that.”

 

Hopkins had to smile. “You’ve an interesting idea of consolation, Doctor.”

 

Foster snorted, smiling unapologetically. “I observe, examine, and excise, Chaplain. Consolation’s more your line, I think. She certainly wasn’t  _ careening _ into me for solace. I think  _ that _ says all that it has to.” He glanced knowingly at Hopkins and passed the last of his chosen stones to him. “Take it how you will. Only... I’ve see the way she looks at you, when she thinks you can’t see.”

 

Hopkins looked up, unsure he’d heard him right. “She...looks at me?”

 

“Like you’re a puzzle she’s trying to solve,” Jed said with a smile. “Best of luck with your skipping,” he said, picking up his jacket from where he’d left it and heading back towards the outskirts of town and the confines of the hospital.

 

Hopkins watched him leave, feeling the stone that Foster had left in his hand. Good balance, and with a rough spot in one side that would make it easier to hold. Not too thick, and a handspan wide. He balanced it in his hands, passing it from one side to the other as if warming it up before the throw.  _ A puzzle she was trying to solve….stumbling along until they pity us.  _ Back and forth, through his hands, the stone seeming to smooth under his touch.

 

_ Oh, just throw it, man!  _ He heard his father’s voice like it was yesterday, on the banks of the creek near their house.  _ Either it goes, or it doesn’t! Wishing don’t change what’s there! _

 

_ True enough.  _ Henry adjusted the stone in his hand, backing up and taking a few light steps towards the water, letting the stone and watching it glide one - two -three - four - five -six -  _ seven _ in a graceful line, curving a little as the final skip hit. Seven. A minor miracle. 

 

_ She watches you.  _

 

_ Wishing don’t change what’s there. _

 

True in stone skipping and in life, it seemed. 

**Author's Note:**

> There was a video on the Mercy Street PBS instagram recently of Luke McFarlane skipping stones at one of their shooting locations. Now, I'm awful at skipping rocks, and I admire anyone who can do anything like that, but let me tell you, this man was something else to watch. It was amazing. (It probably helps he's pretty cute.)
> 
> Annnnd just then I needed a fanfic, so here we are. I didn't really have a clear end-goal while writing this, except the rock skipping, so the plot is...not the most robust. Liked having Foster in there - I know a lot of people having been kicking around the fact that Hopkins and Foster don't talk all that much, so that was fun. There should probably be more religion in there, but I'm being lazy. So Hopkins talks a bit about Emma, and Foster's kind of talking a bit about Mary, like you do.


End file.
